We Burn Like A House On Fire
by Nirav
Summary: In which Quinn's breakdown happens after giving up her child for adoption, and she refuses to go down alone.


**Author's Note: **This is entirely the fault of Nyquil, scotch, and Johnette Napolitano's voice.

* * *

Junior year of high school had been planned out since the seventh grade. A few amendments had been made—who could predict Quinn Fabray cartwheeling into their lives the summer before high school and taking over everything, after all—but the plan hadn't deviated far. Santana should be head cheerleader, the indisputable top of the school with her pinky wrapped around Brittany's at all times because no one dared question her. Even with Quinn shaking up the original journey, Santana should still have displaced her by the eleventh grade, taking her rightful place atop the pyramid.

Instead, Santana is at the top, but only because Quinn got pregnant and then got not-pregnant and then dyed her hair pink and got a hideous tattoo and fell in with the angry side of loserdom. Instead, Santana has the hard press of cold tile at her back and an unfamiliar weight against her front, cool fingers wrenching past the material of her cheerleading uniform and bypassing lines that no one—not even Brittany, with her naiveté and her rose-colored glasses— was meant to see. She has the faint scent of peroxide wafting throughout the bathroom and hot lips on her neck and her leg wrapped around a hip that settled just a few inches lower than Brittany's would. She has teeth scraping against the skin over her collarbone and her hips bucking forward and her fingers scrabbling for purchase against pale arms.

It's not until afterwards, when she's alone in a bathroom that still smells of sex and peroxide and menthol cigarettes, hands shaking as she fixes her hair and makeup and uniform and mind racing at how to explain this to Brittany, that she _remembers._How, when Santana had wrapped a leg tighter around her waist and pulled her closer, hips and the lines of her cheekbones and jaw and shoulder blades had jutted out further than normal from beneath her pale skin. How her eyes were sunken in underneath the black of her makeup. How, when Santana's fingers found material and skin to grip into at her elbow, she had jerked away for the briefest of moments and hissed in pain.

How the sleeves of that godawfully ugly black sweater had ridden up to expose thin arms and the barest archipelago of dark bruises and broken veins, tracking up and down from the crook of Quinn's elbow.

"Son of a _bitch_."

* * *

Brittany doesn't care. _Because it's Quinn_, she had said. Because Quinn is Quinn, and Quinn is broken, and Quinn was their best friend, and not even Sylvester could turn her down when she had her mind set. Because, as Santana had so aptly put it, sex is not dating and Brittany is not her girlfriend. And because Brittany believes in Santana, she believes it when Santana said that fucking Quinn in the bathroom was nothing, and that was that.

Santana promises, though. Because Quinn _is_broken, and Quinn is kind of insane these days, and because Santana loves Brittany more than anything she's ever known and this is a betrayal where neither Puck nor Finn nor any other guy ever was. She promises because she wants nothing to do with Quinn and her crazy.

Two weeks later, though, she finds herself alone after cheerleading practice as she finishes cleaning up the crap the rest of the squad forgot. She'd how no idea how much work went into being the captain, and she's tired and sore and her chest aches still, months after surgery, from being bound down by a sports bra all day.

She's lugging the last empty water cooler up into the back door to the locker room, swearing to make everyone run extra suicides tomorrow, when she cooler is yanked out of her hands. It falls to the concrete with a loud clatter, and before she can react she's back up against a wall—brick, this time, rougher and warmer and harsher than the bathroom tiles—with the familiar scent of peroxide and cigarettes invading her senses and Quinn's tongue sliding silkily past her lips.

She recovers—not soon enough, a part of her curses, because it's been a solid thirty seconds of kissing Quinn desperately and unintentionally, the bite of teeth against her lip and fingernails against her arms demolishing her control—and manages to tear away, shoving Quinn back.

"What the hell,?" she spits out, swiping a hand over her mouth.

Quinn just glares at her, arms crossing over her chest. "Go on, act like you don't want it," she says with a sneer. Santana can't tell if she's actually thinner than two weeks ago, or if she's just so tired that it looks like that; either way, she looks terrible enough to prod at the dormant feelings of guilt in Santana's chest.

"I don't," Santana says. She mirrors Quinn's posture, making doubly sure to square her shoulders and draw herself up to her full height. Guilt or no, she wants nothing to do with Quinn. "I don't want you and I don't need _this_. I'm sure Puckerman would be up for another go if that's what you want, or Berry would let you get your fingers wet if you just need to scratch an itch."

In a flash, she's back against the wall, but this time Quinn is less than inches away, pinning her to the brick and glaring at her in the a deathly calm manner. "Shut. Up," Quinn says softly, because Quinn doesn't ever need to _yell_, her silence and the uncaring apathy in her eyes more terrifying than any raised voice would ever be.

"No," Santana throws back after hesitating just a beat too long. She shoves forward, throwing Quinn off once more. "I don't owe you anything, and I don't have the patience for your identity crisis bullshit. Find someone else to screw with."

She storms past Quinn, intentionally letting her shoulder slam into Quinn's, and makes her way towards the locker room door. Her hand is out to grasp the handle when Quinn is pressed against her back, sandwiching her against the door. Santana growls out a curse, pushing back, but Quinn has height and her years as a base on the Cheerios—she topped the period quickly enough, but had worked her way up, while Santana had always been small enough to be a flyer from day one and never needed the strength to catapult another girl into the air—and her own pure insanity to give even her weakened body strength and an unquestionable upper hand.

Santana shudders, the string of insults on her lips dying out abruptly at the feel of Quinn biting down, rough and sensuous, at the back of her neck. Her legs tremble and her stomach clenches in a way that hurts far too nicely to be okay. Against her will, her head is falling back and her fingers clenching into the material covering Quinn's thigh, pulling her closer as a strangled "_More_" tumble past her lips.

When Quinn leaves her there, falling against the locker room door with her top twisted up over her chest and her underwear down around her knees, she doesn't even have the energy to move, and just slides down to the ground. Hot tears sting at her eyes as fury builds coldly from her stomach, and she straightens her clothes perfectly before finding her way home.

* * *

She doesn't tell Brittany, because Brittany is spending her free time at the Hummel's house to help out Kurt and get tutored in basically everything, and Quinn has disappeared from school, and Santana can do nothing but entertain fantasies of tracking Quinn down and beating the shit out of her.

Instead, she gets in one hit—and oh, god, it feels outstanding to let her palm crack across Quinn's face and watch her whole head snap to the side—before Quinn can even fully form a sneer, and then she meets Quinn halfway, tasting blood from a now-split lip. She yanks Quinn's leg up and around her hip and fucks her against a bleacher support beam until Quinn's eyes roll back and she's biting down into Santana's shoulder and bruising the skin underneath her cheerleading top.

This time, she tells Brittany, the words slipping out in a moment of panic when Brittany brings up duets and _us_ and Melissa Etheridge. Her chest aches at the wounded, confused look in the other girl's eyes, the confusion from Santana's admission overwhelmed by the hurt at her insult. And the next day, when Brittany is avoiding her and she sees Quinn skulking around, rubbing her hands repeatedly against her jeans and scratching at her arms subtly and practically shaking, she grips at a thin forearm hard enough to bruise and throws Quinn—she's tiny, now, unhealthily so, and so _weak_—into an empty supply closet. She pushes herself away later with a sick satisfaction, Quinn a crumpled ball on the floor with track marks on her arms and tremors wracking her body that could just as easily be from drug withdrawal as sex.

"You think you can play this game?" Santana says coolly, fixing her ponytail. "Because you dyed your hair and started shooting your failures away, so now you're a badass? Wise up, teen mom. You're the same lost little girl you were before, and now you just have the look to match the part. Fucking me over because you fucked yourself over won't fix anything. You can't win this."

She's letting the door swing shut behind her when she thinks she hears Quinn mumble something about nobody winning. She ignores it and strides down the hallway, making her way towards Brittany's home ec class.

The satisfaction gets her through the rest of the day, until she's alone in an oversized house. She wakes from a nightmare in the middle of the night, disjointed images of pink hair and broken needles swimming in front of her eyes.

There's a text from Brittany waiting on her phone. Santana squeezes her eyes shut in the dark and recites multiplication tables in her head until she can make it back to sleep.

* * *

Brittany sleeps with Artie, and Santana wins a meaningless competition because she sang with Scheu's second favorite diva, and Quinn starts missing days and days at a time. Half of the days that Quinn actually shows up, Santana is pinned down by a girl with manic eyes and a glare like ice and unbearably strong hands. Quinn exhales painfully every time a hand accidentally brushes past the tender skin on her arms, but it doesn't stop her from being the only person who could ever hold Santana down.

Santana exacts her revenge on the days when her own rage is pushing to the surface—because Brittany doesn't trust her now, because Brittany is too busy with her _boyfriend _have time for her anymore, because her parents forgot her birthday—she's the one who finds Quinn and throws her against a wall. She adds her own bite marks to the scratches and puncture Quinn's decorated herself with, lets her fingernails claw roughly over the hideous tattoo, shoves her into the tiniest spaces available just because Quinn's always been terrified of being closed in.

It's nothing like Brittany. The walls leave bruises and scrapes on her shoulder blades, and Quinn's teeth break skin. Her own hands sting, on the days she hates Quinn more than she can't help but want her, from trying to slap some sense into Quinn's rebellious head or some life into her shaking body. It hurts, and it's hateful, and it _works_. Because she and Quinn, they've always been the most hated people in this school for a reason. They're two of a kind, mirroring sides of an unconscionable coin, separate and apart from even the worst of the slushy-flinging jocks.

She's going to stop. Every time she's sliding to the floor because Quinn doesn't bother to hold her up and her legs are too rubbery to hold her weight, or she's leaving a shaking and withdrawn Quinn behind, is the last one. Because Quinn's issues aren't worth losing Brittany over, because she's slipping away from Brittany no matter how hard she tries to hold on. She doesn't need anything Quinn has to offer; there's no appeal in Quinn's guarded eyes or thin frame that Brittany's heart and athleticism can't trump; the heady intoxicating rush of control and power and security isn't worth the mess she's letting Quinn drag her into.

But then she's back in some discarded corner of the school or a gas station bathroom— or, that one time, bent over the trunk of her own car in the empty parking lot long after a football game's end— always with Quinn instead of Brittany, fingers knotting in sweaters and jeans and ridiculous hats that are a far cry from a cheerleading uniform. Sometimes it's rage that pulls her back, sometimes confusion, sometimes disgust, but distance functions like a rubber band, stretching her further and further away until she snaps back into Quinn's orbit, gravitating back to Quinn's anger and loneliness and sickly body.

* * *

Sometime after the glee club wins Sectionals with the requisite Rachel Berry solo, Quinn vanishes. It isn't the first time—the longest span to date has been four days straight, even if Santana would slap anyone who might insinuate that she would know—but she counts the days religiously. It hurts less than watching Artie wheel Brittany to class, or to indulge in Brittany's idea of friendly cuddling in the evenings, to slip in and out of Quinn's favorite hiding places in search of pink hair and the stench of cheap cigarettes.

Two days before school breaks for the semester, Quinn's been gone for nine days straight and Santana opportunistically follows one of the skanks out to the bleachers during lunch.

"Hey," she says with a sneer, fingers wrapping tightly around Mack's wrist and yanking her around. "Where's Quinn?"

The other girl wavers before sneering at Santana and shoving her back. "Get out of here, cheer slut. This is our place."

"Oh, hell no," Santana grinds out. A thrill of adrenaline rushes through her, and she flings Mack back against the same bleacher support that she's thrown Quinn into at least ten different times before. "This entire school is my place, greaser. What I say goes and if I say that you're going to tell me where the hell Quinn Fabray is, you're going to tell me right now or I spike Coach Sylvester's protein shakes with laxatives and tell her you did it."

She sneers at the flash of fear crossing the other girl's face. "So tell me, right now, where she is. This place smells like a dumpster and it's making me break out in hives."

Mack, impossibly, inexplicably, shrinks away. There's guilt practically radiating out of her, and it sets a hot blanket of fury and fear across Santana's chest. "Speak. Now," she barks out.

"I don't know where she is," Mack mutters.

"Bullshit."

"I don't!" Mack says. She's tugging at the cuffs of her jacket, pulling them over her hands and shivering in the December wind. Her eyes are sunken in, free of makeup and rimmed with red and fatigue. "We stopped by a party a few days ago and this dealer really wanted her to stick around, he's an artist—"

"Artist?" Santana freezes in her glare, the determined intimidation sliding right out of her. Fear unravels, cold and paralyzing and mysterious, in her stomach, as the broken veins and bruises tracking along Quinn's arms flash in front of her over a soundtrack of her father's lectures about overdose cases brought into his emergency room. "As in speedball?"

Mack looks away guiltily, and Santana flashes forward, one hand yanking at Mack's hair and slamming her head back. She glowers when Mack cries out at the sickening crack of her skull impacting the metal. "Where is she now?" Santana says, quiet and gentle and terrifying.

"I don't know!" Mack cries out. "I called an ambulance, they took her, I haven't seen her since."

Snarling, Santana throws her back against the beam and sprints off, the sound of pained breathing following her around the corner of the bleachers. The football team is on its way out to practice, Coach Beiste as uncaring as Coach Sylvester about the flakes of snows that are starting to drift down, and Santana spies Puckerman trailing out of the locker room, late as always.

"Give me your keys," she demands, cornering him. "Now."

"What?"

"My car's in the shop, I need to go, give me your goddamned keys," she says. "I won't crash your stupid truck, just give them to me _now_."

"God, fine, whatever," he says, holding his hands up in defeat. "They're in my bag, in my locker. You know, the one where we fuc—"

She's already gone before he can finish the sentence. His clothes and bag litter the floor when she makes it back out of the locker room and sprints to the parking lot. She breaks at least six traffic laws on the way to the Fabray's house, and skids to a halt when she sees Quinn's sister stepping out of the front door.

"Where is she?" Santana asks. Desperation raises her voice, her chest beating heavily, and her Cheerios uniform is no protection against the cold in the air, but her focus is locked entirely on a woman she's met once and never liked.

"Do I know you?"

"Fuck that," Santana snarls. "Where's Quinn?"

Charlotte—Santana remembers her name in a brief moment of sanity—seems to shrink visibly at the words, arms curling around herself as she jerks her head towards the house behind her. "She's sleeping."

Nausea masquerading as relief punches through Santana's gut, and she stumbles back, the cold metal of Puck's truck keeping her upright. "She's—"

"She's okay," Charlotte says softly. "The first few days were hard, and the—the detox isn't over yet, but she refuses to go to a rehab facility. We're helping her through it."

Santana nods dumbly. Her legs are shaking, uncannily similar to every time Quinn left her in the quivering aftermath of an orgasm, and she slump abruptly, tired and weak.

"I remember you," Charlotte says. "Santana, right? You made Cheerios the same year."

Santana is silent, straightening her jacket and pulling her shoulders back. She could consider why the possibility of Quinn dying affected her so much, but that would mean acknowledging her own culpability alongside Quinn's, so she simply lifts her chin and crosses her arms over her chest.

"Yeah, that's me."

"You and that other girl, the tall one," Charlotte says slowly. "You both backed her up—"

"It's whatever," Santana interrupts, and Charlotte flinches visibly at her tone.

"She should be awake now, if you want to—"

"No," Santana interrupts. She ignores the other woman and stalks back around to the driver's side of the truck. She drives off without a second glance at Charlotte Fabray.

* * *

Quinn returns to school two weeks later. Her hair is blonde again, her makeup subtle, her clothes similar to those she wore when pregnant but three sizes too loose on her skeletal frame. Santana marches right by her without acknowledging the fact that she's there, or that Rachel is fluttering around Quinn with incessant questions, or that Brittany shoots a confused look back at the way Quinn's shoulders and spine slump under the weight of her backpack.

In the middle of fourth period, Santana leaves her physics class with a lie balanced on the weight of Sue Sylvester's name, and finds Quinn in the alcove by the back entrance to the Cheerios locker room. She's curled into a ball on the cold concrete, smoking a cigarette and staring lifelessly through the chain link fence that separates the school from the rest of the world. A sweater that Santana knows fit her perfectly a year ago hangs limply from her shoulders, the sleeves rattling loosely around her wrists every time she moves to inhale. Her backpack sits by her feet, and somehow, even almost-empty, it looks larger than the entirety of her torso and arms.

"Go away," Quinn says dully, not looking over to where Santana stands.

"You're an idiot."

Quinn doesn't answer, instead simply taking another drag from the cigarette. Santana moves to lean against the fence, staring down at Quinn. It's exhilarating, to be looking down at her for once, to have an upper hand, no matter how false it may be.

"You're an idiot," she says again, folding her arms across her chest. "Or, actually, you're even more of an idiot that I thought was possible. "Because apparently it's not enough to throw yourself in with the skanks and their stupidity, but you just _had_to one-up them all and speedball your way into a hospital."

She spits the words out, her mouth dry and the cold air around them unforgiving in spite of her Cheerios letterman. The word _speedball_is foreign and bitter in her mouth, but Quinn doesn't even flinch. Santana's patience evaporates in less than a second, and without even realizing it she's wrapped her hands around Quinn's bony upper arms and yanked her into a standing position, shoving her against the brick wall behind her.

"Stop." It comes out as a breathy gasp, pushing weakly past Quinn's lips as the air is shoved abruptly out of her lungs with the impact.

"Shut up," Santana snarls, pushing forward until her entire body is pressing Quinn's to the wall, shoulders and hips and knees harsh and heavy against Quinn's. "You started this, but it's not over until I say so. I told you you'd never win."

"Stop," Quinn wheezes out again. Her arms are hanging limply in Santana's grasp, her entire body slumping.

"Why?" Santana says. She presses forward again, fingernails digging into Quinn's arms so hard she can feel skin break through the material of Quinn's sweater. "You didn't when I said to stop. You never cared what it did to me. You brought this on yourself."

"Like you didn't keep finding me," Quinn says thinly. Her eyes are suddenly sharp, her body tense in Santana's hands. "Like you didn't use me the exact same way."

"I never wanted this," Santana grinds out. "You found _me_in that bathroom." She grips impossibly tighter to Quinn's arms, and Quinn's jaw clenches, but not enough to stop a small whine of pain from escaping. Santana sneers darkly and jerks forward, biting down on Quinn's lip sharply.

"Stop," Quinn whispers yet again, head jerking back from Santana until the brick stops her retreat.

"You never stopped." Santana's words come out as an angry, desperate hiss, and she presses a leg roughly between Quinn's, shoving her knees apart. One hand jerks away from Quinn's arm to grab at the back of her neck and yank her forward for a violent kiss, teeth and tongue forcing their way into Quinn's mouth to the sound of her whimpering.

Santana pulls back for air, drunk on finally, unequivocally having the upper hand and fingers winding harshly into the hair on the back of Quinn's head. Quinn goes limp in her hands, spine curving and legs buckling abruptly, until she's hanging from Santana's grip with her head turned away and eyes shut tightly.

"Please don't," she manages to gasp out, voice thick and breaking, and it rips through Santana abruptly, dismantling the feeling of power and control. She stumbles back, hands flying away from Quinn and coming up to cover her mouth.

Quinn slumps against the wall and slides down, her sweater catching and pulling and ripping on the brick, until she's back on the ground and curling around herself, breath coming in loud, labored gasps. Santana falls back until she collides with the corner of the fencing, eyes wide and horrified, body trembling under the weight of what might have happened. They always brought out the worst in each other, to be certain—backstabbing and undermining and lobbing too-real insults back and forth to ever be _friends_—but this is a new and mortifying low.

She doesn't move until she realizes that Quinn is clawing at her backpack with shaking hands, no doubt for the inhaler she had always kept handy at Cheerios practice; Santana moves automatically, yanking herself from the fence to drop to her knees at Quinn's side and help.

Quinn scrambles back, pressing herself protectively into the wall Santana had just been shoving her against, and Santana wavers under a swell of nausea before forcing it away and searching for the inhaler. She finally finds it, ironically shoved into an outside pocket with a pack of cigarettes, and she shifts slowly, holding it up for a still-gasping Quinn to see.

She holds it out carefully, her other hand carefully out and open, as if to prove she isn't hiding a weapon. Quinn yanks the inhaler out of her grasp and can barely calm her hands enough to get the cap off and raise it to her lips; when she does manage, it takes three hits before the medicine seems to hit her lungs and release the tension in her throat enough for her breath to come more easily.

Santana wraps her arms around her knees and pulls them close to her chest, shrinking back towards the chain link fence. Quinn isn't looking at her, instead falling tiredly to the side against the wall and staring at the ground, her body slanted awkwardly towards the wall because she can't seem to make her legs move.

"I'm—I wasn't—" Santana manages to say after long minutes. Her voice shakes and shudders, even if her body is finally still. "I wouldn't have."

Quinn is silent and still, eyes still locked down on the dirty concrete they're sitting on. "I know," she finally says. Her voice is flat and dull and barely strong enough to reach Santana's ears.

Santana swallows, her lips forming around the words, but she can't find it in herself to actually voice an apology. What comes out instead is, "So are you sober now?" and they both flinch visibly.

"So far," Quinn mumbles. Her knuckles are white, fingers gripping tightly enough to the inhaler to make the plastic creak, and Santana shrinks back even further into herself at the sound. Seconds tick past, widening carelessly into minutes, and neither of them moves.

"So what now?" Santana finally says. Quinn hasn't moved except to mirror Santana's position, tugging her knees up to her chest protectively and hugging them tightly. Her inhaler is still in her hand, pressing so hard into her calf that Santana can see it shaking, the plastic giving, under her grasp.

"I don't know." Quinn's answer comes after extensive silence and avoidance, her eyes focused somewhere in the dirt and concrete around her toes. Santana sinks back into the fence behind her, tired and weary, and her hands fall tiredly to slap against the ground at her side. Quinn doesn't move, at the movement or the sound, and Santana's posture slips even more, her entire body sinking back into the fence.

She curls back around herself, arms skimming around the front of her shins as they round her entire body into a small ball. Her forehead falls against her knees, her spine slipping and curving and slumping exhaustedly, and by the time the final bell for the day has run, she hasn't moved.

She straightens up slowly at the sound of the dismissal bell, years of Cheerio conditioning her to move for practice. Quinn hasn't moved, still wrapped around her knees.

Santana pushes herself to her feet, slow and uncertain, and hesitates for only the barest of moments before squatting back down in front of Quinn. Her hands hover out in front of her, close but not actually touching Quinn, and she only needs to deep breaths before finding it in herself to drop her hand to Quinn's shoulder.

"I'll give you a ride home," she says quietly, and five minutes and one text message to Brittany later, she's leading Quinn out to the parking lot. The telltale sound of shuffling feet behind her informs Quinn's progress, matching her pace. Even her footsteps sound beaten down.

"So what now?" Quinn echoes her question from earlier when Santana slows the car in Quinn's driveway.

"Who knows," Santana finally says. Quinn is silent, staring stoically at the dashboard for long moments, before she simply slips out of the car and makes her way up to the front door without ever actually looking at Santana.

Santana ignores the way Quinn's limbs are still trembling visibly, the way it seems to be a challenge for her to pick up her feet and walk in a straight line. She backs out of the drive and sets off down the road, never looking back.


End file.
